Questions America Is Asking: "Art Advisors: Are They Worth It?"

Maybe if it's Bernard Berenson.
Or maybe not, links below.
From Barron's Penta:

It was bound to happen: As the market has exploded in recent years, legions of scholars, former gallery owners, and others have gone into business as art advisors, offering their services to help folks build a smart art collection. Walk into any big art fair and you’ll bump into dozens of these creatures, maybe hundreds. But should you hire one?

Good art advisors coach everyone from the greenhorn needing an education to the aficionado hunting down specific works to fill out their collection. Karen Boyer runs the art advisory Elements in Play and is a former hedge-fund executive who studied art history at the Sorbonne and turned it into a consulting business.
Boyer is currently hunting for works from artists such as Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly for clients wanting some serious art cred. “A lot of times, these works are hanging on someone else’s wall in another country,” she says.

For the art collecting newbies, the first order of business for an advisor is to help educate the client. In an initial 45-minute meeting, Boyer swipes through thousands of images on her iPad to get her clients’ reactions, discovering, say, that they don’t like brightly colored figurative paintings. She then takes them to galleries or art fairs, sometimes challenging their initial tastes.

Courtesy of William J. O’Brien/Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Photo: Jason Wyche

William J. O’Brien’s Untitled, purchased by a client of art advisor Karen Boyer at a New York gallery.

The costs can be considerable. According to Wendy Cromwell, president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors, advisors typically charge a sliding scale commission of 20% for art works under $100,000 that you purchase under their guidance; that commission might go as low as 5% for works over $1 million. Of course, the more often you return to an advisor, the more bargaining power you’ll have. Those who want advice only should expect to pay $100 to $250 per hour, Cromwell says.

The payment arrangements can get complicated. Galleries often give art consultants 10% to 20% discounts on artwork, since they bring in customers, and some advisors keep a portion, or all, of the discount for themselves in addition to their fees. Boyer takes a 10% commission off the top for works over $10,000, and passes the entire negotiated discount along to her clients. That way, she explains, her clients know how she is paid upfront, and everything is transparent....MORE

We've bumped into Berenson a few times, most memorably in "Duveen, The Greatest Salesman in the World: Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson and the Boston Connection Pt. IV" where he became the adviser to Mrs. Gardner and a bit of a bête noire  to Duveen:

The courtyard of Mrs. Gardner's home, now the museum and site of the $500 million art theft

For more on the first gun for hire of the art world see the New York Review of Books "Only in America"
and The Spectator's "How honest was Bernard Berenson?"